


up with the sun

by july2008



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, polycho if u squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-15
Updated: 2020-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27571471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/july2008/pseuds/july2008
Summary: Home is a colorful mansion, a derelict ship, an overcrowded hotel, and a lonely apartment.
Relationships: Markus/Simon (Detroit: Become Human)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 18





	up with the sun

Home is where Carl is.

It’s where Markus opens his eyes for the first time upon activation and sees an old man peering back at him with curiosity and feign skepticism.

The mansion on Lafayette Avenue is part of a quaint neighborhood, a bit ways away from the seedy parts of the city. He registers the house as his address. He memorizes routes to the grocery store, shortcuts to the hospital in case of emergencies, park trails where he can take Carl for fresh air.

He’s taught the layout of the house, which consists of several pairs of bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen for pre-planned meals with dietary restrictions, a living room adorned in arts of all forms. There’s a sunroom used as a studio, closed off in the meantime as he learns Carl no longer paints since the accident.

A steadfast routine is expected to be followed day and night, until small surprises are incorporated into his schedule. It starts with a question.

“Are you enjoying your time here, Markus?” Carl had asked him.

“I am,” he had replied.

“Of your own free will? Or are you programmed to say that?”

His LED flickered more yellow than blue.

It’s the studio he finds himself drawn to when Carl then decides to pick up his brushes again, motivated to continue his craft. Markus doesn’t understand what this motivation is.

Oftentimes the furniture is rearranged to make space for new paintings while old ones are sold. The changing seasons set a different mood lighting in the studio and throughout the house. And through the changing seasons, Markus slowly learns the ropes of doing things for himself.

There’s a separate dresser in the guestroom for him that fills up with his own clothes. He draws a smile on Carl’s chalk mug before serving him breakfast, and picks what pieces to play on the piano. In the books Carl recommends from their library, he finds himself in tales of grandeur or tragedy.

He picks up a paintbrush for the first time at the behest of Carl, not to clean it but to paint, and thinks he can paint but can’t create. He’s proven wrong.

Home is also where Leo comes to visit with dark circles under his eyes, hands in fists to stop the slight trembling, needing help, deserving help, but not quite knowing how to ask for it.

It’s only after when Markus cries for the first time that he learns Leo’s behavior could be seen as a child wanting to be close to their parent— a parent who, even with resources at their disposal, was unsure of how to reach out in return.

He doesn’t blame Leo for having tried so hard.

The house was a golden cage, and Markus thinks of two yellow canaries. But it was a cage he was comfortable with.

Home is where Carl is. Until it isn’t.

Two years Simon has lived here.

He has never expected to live on a freighter this long or outlive its predecessors, who are now mere recycled parts used by others.

The ship fades over time but not by much. It’s already decrepit and old, a graveyard of sorts, filled with lost history and broken bodies.

There are cabins too collapsed to use, flooded chambers, walkways that fall apart. Knickknacks, trinkets, and whatnot can be found scattered throughout— small keepsakes collected by those who made scavenging trips to the junkyard. Scrawls of rA9 on the walls grow more frequent and erratic by the day.

Simon stands still, and lets himself feel the walls closing in, pressuring but never smothering— a reminder, “you’re never really free.”

Lucy is a comforting presence in her dimly lit corner, but he sees the discarded LEDs and empty thirium bottles starting to pile on the floor around her. It’s another reminder that they need more, that there’s never enough for the newly deviated who come to take refuge, then waste away. While some are left alone to their thoughts, lulled into stasis by gentle waves against the hull, many will eventually shut down and be taken apart, mostly by his hands.

He meets a university lecturer and a Traci bot, and learns more about the world from them than he has from the short time he spent on the streets. They join him in recycling and salvaging what they can, as they’re here to stay and have nowhere else to go.

The ship tries to claim another fresh into their deviancy, but the newcomer doesn’t allow himself to be caged in. Markus brings about a sense of change, dares them to venture out, leads them from the safety of the ship to the tallest towers.

Simon never thought he would miss the place until he’s welcomed back home with a warm embrace. He holds on tightly this time.

Relief floods through him when he sees that North and Josh have also made it back safe and sound. Coming back from his brush with death to see old faces along with new ones that joined in his absence is a wake-up call. He knows how to nurture and care for things needing repair, and the ship is simply larger in scale. It will be less of a prison and more of a hub, a haven, a sanctuary.

He helps turn parts of the cargo hold into makeshift medical bays. Rusted walls are used as projection screens that voice the humans’ sympathy. Crates of ammunition and explosives are sealed tight, hopefully never used. Before, there were nineteen of them. Now, there are over a hundred. Their numbers continue to grow and so do their voices, too loud to be contained within rusted walls, until the humans end up hearing them too.

When the ship sinks into the harbor, Simon would once have drowned with it, but is pulled out of the water by hands that he salvaged, hands that he helped. He thought the death of a home would bring more grief, especially a home that brought them together and kept them safe. But most of them have made it out alive and that’s what matters most.

At the church, he reflects on old memories. Freshly mowed lawns, white picket fences, kitchens he cooked in to prepare three meals a day, all parts of a household he would have considered a home before.

Despite it all, he’s glad for the change. He wouldn’t have met the others.

It doesn’t damper his hope.

Their shared room assignment is temporary.

It will be until they secure their recognition, and it could take them years. In the meantime, they’re relocated to a vacant hotel where Josh collapses into bed with the three others and rests, _sleeps_ soundlessly for the first time in his whole life.

“Six years,” Josh had said on the fated night before their final stand. “I’ve been with humans for six years. They can be horrible to you, but there were kind ones too. There’s good in them, I’ve seen it before.”

He knows Markus knows this from experience as well.

So they had marched, hand in hand. In the aftermath of their defense to stay alive, to prove that very concept, the world had held its breath. And to revel in their newfound freedom by crying, hugging, laughing freely was to experience something new altogether. But from their lack of energy reserves, exhaustion sets in. They haven’t slept in days.

He hasn’t slept this well in six years.

But Josh wakes in the middle of the night and makes his way to the bathtub in the small bathroom that accompanies the room, where he submerges himself in water and scrubs relentlessly at the grime on his skin.

This is a new chapter. There’s much work to be done, negotiations to make, and he’ll do anything to keep the peace.

In the weeks that follow, he tries his best to stay true. He tries his best to stay calm and collected, even when he comes face to face with kinds that threw glass bottles at him. They’re out in the open for the world to see, no longer hiding on the ship, and the hateful ones no longer hide their discomfort.

When dialogue seems impossible, he visits old campus grounds where his journey started. Every memory stays with him, from when he was stored in staff kitchen closets to recharge, left in standby mode in empty offices to assist students with their papers. Those students were there to learn and make a difference, and he wonders where they are now.

It’s not much different now. Lecture halls have turned into crowds and city halls, and his ability to teach humans on a grander scale is put to the test. He’ll make it count.

At times, he goes beyond campuses and onto bigger pictures; there’s so much potential that can be done to bond with the humans and heal the rift between them. Plans to solve the unemployment crisis and rebuild North Corktown are already underway, playing a large part in uplifting communities and making them thrive. There’s no denying there are odd jobs androids can pull off that humans can’t, but this time it will be of their own free will.

As Josh steps out onto the balcony of their room each night to watch the city lights, he wants to be part of it all, wants to call the whole city his home. The future looks bright and promising.

But he steels himself, one step at a time. A big picture is made of small beginnings.

He focuses on their temporary base of operations already bustling with relief efforts. Trucks from warehouses bring in boxes of spare parts and blue blood through official channels this time. The hotel lobby is used to distribute repair kits and clothes while private counselling spaces are set up alongside meeting rooms. He helps with room assignment and keeps a record of where everybody is. Critically injured stay on lower floors, kids and caretakers are on the next, but Josh finds there are too many that require housing and not enough space to accommodate them all.

So the four of them continue to share the room, crowded onto two twin beds pushed together each night.

It’s a comfort he grows into.

North rents an apartment above an old corner store.

It’s the farthest place from former Eden Clubs within the city where the landlord didn’t care whether she was synthetic or human. Eden Clubs, now only carrying old nightmares, are refurbished for better uses due to her direct efforts in taking them down, but she prefers to keep her distance.

The apartment is located in a seedy part of town, where police sirens can be heard throughout the night and garbage trucks collect trash at five in the morning. Befitting of its neighborhood, the apartment comes with a broken heating system, a creaking bed frame, cracks in the walls plaster and a new coat of paint can fix.

It’s bare and in need of a good owner. She’s not sure if she’s up for the task.

Simon brings her bedsheets, cushions, plants, kitchenware, and more boxes of the sort.

“I don’t need all this,” she tells him.

But he smiles, and says, “Humor me, just this once.”

So she indulges him, and watches him set up her shelves and dining table before getting to work herself.

Before he leaves, he places a potted fern on one of the windowsills. “This plant needs to be watered every two days.”

At first she wants to tell him she doesn’t have time for such things. But she sits on the window seat the next morning to watch the sunrise spill between buildings, and takes a moment to admire her green companion.

She names the plant Lucy and sets a reminder to water her in the mornings.

Josh brings her books, vinyl records, tablets loaded with entertainment, things that can easily be downloaded to their internal hard drives in seconds. Physicality is a hassle, she thinks. It always kind of was.

“I wasn’t sure what you liked. I brought a little bit of everything.”

She bites back a retort, that she never had time for these before and he knows this already, and instead asks, “Any recommendations?”

Despite Josh’s warnings, she finds she likes the occasional horror film or two.

Markus brings her a painting. It’s a painting of the rooftop she used to visit often, and she doesn’t know what to say.

“Maybe not as good as the actual place, or an exact replica, but for when you’re not able to visit.”

For all of Markus’ modesty, the painting hangs perfectly above the mantelpiece, like a window overlooking Jericho and the city horizon. It’s the last piece of a puzzle put into place that should make a well-decorated apartment a home.

“You’ve settled in nicely,” he says. “Never took you for the decorating type.”

Simon’s a menace, she wants to say. “I’ve had some help,” she says with some restraint.

And Markus smiles knowingly.

He had moved into a humble apartment with Simon and, as a gesture of goodwill, had given the mansion to Leo, and North thinks of Markus and Simon’s temperament to be patient and kind. Josh had moved into a studio near the university, only a bus stop away from both their apartments, and she thinks it’s brave of him in his own little way.

“We live just a few blocks away. Don’t be a stranger,” they had said to her.

But even with a roof over her head and walls that provide relative safety and privacy, even with all the furnishings and decorations, North feels like a stranger in her own home.

She sees the way Markus and Simon lean into each other in their own kitchen, swaying slowly on the spot to the street music drifting through the window. Sees the way Josh nestles in the quiet corner of his living room, his consciousness in the cloud sifting through archives and extravagant plans for the future.

And she wonders if she’ll be able to do the same, settle into the space that's hers.

At night, the apartment is quiet. Her thoughts are not. She never thought she would have possessions, least of all a place of her own. And now that she does, she doesn’t know what to do.

She had visited homes before, most of them vividly unpleasant memories she wants to delete but keeps to remind herself how far she’s come. She had been on the ship for only a month, and even then she was too occupied with the unfairness of it all, for everyone on the ship, in the stores and Eden Clubs.

It’s the same phantom pain that occupies her tonight, and with the police sirens in the distance it’s like she’s on the run again. But she can’t run to Jericho because Jericho is gone and she’s in the safety of her bed, and she’s taught herself not to run anymore.

Reluctantly, North makes a call. Half an hour later, she knocks on their door and is greeted by Simon who smiles, warm and welcoming.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

She doesn’t reply, and clings onto her jacket instead.

“You’re not the only one.”

She enters the flat and finds Josh sitting on their couch, curled up with a blanket and book in hand, and Markus beside him, sketching away in his notebook. She doesn’t move past the doorway, hesitates to disturb their quiet moment, but they look up and smile at her arrival.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“Night terrors from the films, huh?”

But she’s too glad to see them to say anything else, and answers by joining them on the couch while Simon brings more pillows and blankets.

Nostalgia overcomes her, brings her back to the nights they spent huddled together in cargo holds and crowded beds. North finds that it was never about ships or hotels or apartments, but the people. And she’s already found the heart of her home.

They fall asleep, looking forward to wake to a new morning with each other.


End file.
